Elian — Trailer

It was Thanksgiving Day in 1999 that a young Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez was discovered off the coast of Florida, floating on a rubber inner tube. Elian's mother drowned a couple of days prior while trying to flee Castro's Cuba for the United States. Their small boat capsized during the middle of the excursion. Almost immediately Elian's harrowing story became a worldwide media sensation. And it also became the center of a fiery political debate on whether Elian should be granted political asylum in the U.S.

Many in the Cuba-American community wanted to see Elian stay in the country permanently with his Miami relatives. However, Elian's Cuban father publicly demanded the U.S. government to send his son back to Cuba as soon as possible. In a lot of ways, Elian became a political football tossed between the Clinton administration and the Castro regime, which only got more heated after U.S. federal agents were ordered on Easter Eve to physically take Elian in custody and remove him from the country.

In the new CNN and Alex Gibney-produced documentary "ELIAN," which is directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Tim Golden and award-winning photographer Ross McDonnell, the Elian Gonzalez story is revisited 17 years later, chronicling the headline-making events as told by Elian (now 23) and his relatives.

The documentary is currently screening at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, but will officially open in theaters on May 17th. Watch the trailer, above.

synopsis: The world thought it knew Elian Gonzalez's story: The boy who washed up on the Florida coast after a deadly crossing from Cuba who became the center of an extraordinary, never-before-experienced media firestorm and international custody battle, pitting family members against each other and testing political policy at a crucial moment in history.

The CNN documentary ELIAN shows how this incredible story is interwoven into the current political climate -- and shows, for the first time, Elian Gonzalez today speaking in a never-before-seen unfiltered way about his experiences.